A woman incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla died earlier this month during a heat wave that sent Chowchilla’s temperatures over 111 degrees during the Fourth of July weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Elizabeth Nomura, an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, told the Chronicle that her organization had received “distressing” messages from several women at the prison, who reported temperatures over 95 degrees in some of the cells, which are windowless and hold as many as eight people.
According to the Felony Murder Elimination Project, the woman who died on July 6 was “47-year-old Adrienne Boulware,a 47-year-old mother, grandmother, and beloved community member.”
The California Coalition for Women Prisoners stated on its website that the prison staff told the family “she had died from a heat stroke.” The CCWP is calling for “a comprehensive public health investigation into the tragic death…and the immediate implementation of basic lifesaving heat protocols in all of California’s prisons.”
The CCWF houses almost 4,000 women and 400 nonbinary people, including all 20 women who have been sentenced to death in California.
There is no relief in sight for the incarcerated. State agencies have decided that it is just too expensive to set heat standards in California’s prisons and jails, despite the recent triple-digit temperatures the state sweated through earlier this month.
Although the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA) “voted unanimously to adopt safety measures that require employers to provide cooling areas and monitor workers for signs of heat illness when indoor workplace temperatures reach or surpass 82 degrees,” in June, after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office expressed concerns about the costs of the new requirements, OSHA excluded prisons and jails from those safety measures, the Los Angeles Times reported.
It’s a remarkably ruthless decision.”California has a moral and legal obligation to ensure that incarcerated people are protected from heat,” UCLA Carceral Ecologies Lab Director and UCLA Heat Lab Director Bharat Jayram Venkat wrote in an LA Times op-ed. They note that California spends almost $133,000 a year “to keep one person in custody. If we can’t provide for those people’s basic needs, we are obligated to release them.”
There is probably no better example of how the state marginalizes and dehumanizes those in prison than its decision that saving money is more important than the health and even the lives of the 94,000 individuals in its prisons and jails.
